Do Electric Cars Have a Carbon Footprint?

As electric cars become more common and less expensive, their impact on climate change is becoming clearer by the day. Greenhouse gas emissions from internal combustion engines is a known threat, but the emissions created while building an electric vehicle have caused many people to wonder how green EVs actually are.

It takes a power plant of some sort to generate electricity, but regardless of the power source, electricity means nothing without batteries or a way to store the power. A life cycle assessment of electric cars must account for electricity generation and its effects on the environment, because even the most efficiently and responsibly produced lithium ion batteries have a carbon footprint.

Power plants that rely on renewable resources—such as wind, hydro, solar energy, and even nuclear power—do not create carbon emissions at a rate that makes charging an EV worse than fueling a gasoline vehicle.Vehicle emissions are just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to CO2 emissions and vehicles. Manufacturing emissions, including transportation of the raw materials needed to build a car battery, can be vast.

It's true that a life-cycle assessment will show that gas vehicles produce greenhouse gases and have a far more negative effect on human health, but the data show that internal combustion engines are cleaner now than they ever have been before.If you've recently learned about hybrid vehicles—or even plug-in hybrids—you wouldn't be faulted to think that electric vehicles might require gas at some point to operate.

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